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Is It a Duck or a Rabbit? For Google Cloud Vision, Depends on Image Rotation

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Re: Is It a Duck or a Rabbit? For Google Cloud Vision, Depends on Image Rotation

#11

It’s a drawing of a creature that looks a bit like a rabbit or a duck from different angles but is very clearly neither, at best a bad drawing. That’s the failure here - it’s classifying into one of its categories when it shouldn’t be classifying at all.

It's one of those optical illusions, where we (humans) do recognize animals. I don't think it's reasonable to limit classifications to the specific case where a drawing perfectly resembles a certain animal.

The interesting part (IMO) isn't that the AI classifies it as both a rabbit and a duck, but that the classification is dependent on the rotation of the picture.

Re: Is It a Duck or a Rabbit? For Google Cloud Vision, Depends on Image Rotation

#12

When the output switches to rabbit the picture actually resembles a rabbit. I am unsure if this experiment was supposed to be a “haha look how stupid AI is” type thing or not, but it seems like the cloud vision api is performing as intended.

The interesting part (IMO) isn't that the AI classifies it as both a rabbit and a duck, but that the classification is dependent on the rotation of the picture.

I can somewhat understand how that happens, but I find it's in an interesting observation (rather than a criticism on the system, though the title is somewhat unclear and had me expect something else).

Re: Is It a Duck or a Rabbit? For Google Cloud Vision, Depends on Image Rotation

#15
post #12

When the output switches to rabbit the picture actually resembles a rabbit. I am unsure if this experiment was supposed to be a “haha look how stupid AI is” type thing or not, but it seems like the cloud vision api is performing as intended.

The interesting part (IMO) isn't that the AI classifies it as both a rabbit and a duck, but that the classification is dependent on the rotation of the picture. I can somewhat understand how that happens, but I find it's in an interesting observation (rather than a criticism on the system, though the title is somewhat unclear and had me expect something else).

But rotation does contain information. 6 and 9 can be considered as a case where rotation SHOULD change the classifier's output.

AI does makes dumb predictions from time to time, but I my opinion, this isn't that strong a case. When it rotate upside down, it does look like a rabbit even to me.

The more interesting 'failure' here to me, is that while the rotation is smooth, the prediction is not, instead it is flickering, which does raise some interesting questions about what the model's internal distribution surface looks like.

Re: Is It a Duck or a Rabbit? For Google Cloud Vision, Depends on Image Rotation

#17
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The interesting part (IMO) isn't that the AI classifies it as both a rabbit and a duck, but that the classification is dependent on the rotation of the picture. I can somewhat understand how that happens, but I find it's in an interesting observation (rather than a criticism on the system, though the title is somewhat unclear and had me expect something else).

But rotation does contain information. 6 and 9 can be considered as a case where rotation SHOULD change the classifier's output. AI does makes dumb predictions from time to time, but I my opinion, this isn't that strong a case. When it rotate upside down, it does look like a rabbit even to me. The more interesting 'failure' here to me, is that while the rotation is smooth, the prediction is not, instead it is flicker…

Thank you for this comment. To me, duck v. rabbit on rotation just proves the system works as intended.

Re: Is It a Duck or a Rabbit? For Google Cloud Vision, Depends on Image Rotation

#18
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The interesting part (IMO) isn't that the AI classifies it as both a rabbit and a duck, but that the classification is dependent on the rotation of the picture. I can somewhat understand how that happens, but I find it's in an interesting observation (rather than a criticism on the system, though the title is somewhat unclear and had me expect something else).

But rotation does contain information. 6 and 9 can be considered as a case where rotation SHOULD change the classifier's output. AI does makes dumb predictions from time to time, but I my opinion, this isn't that strong a case. When it rotate upside down, it does look like a rabbit even to me. The more interesting 'failure' here to me, is that while the rotation is smooth, the prediction is not, instead it is flicker…

In the reddit comment the author noted that the training set is frequently rotated to help the system generalize better (maybe that's why people is fascinated by this animation at the first place). Possible explanations thus include: the Vision API is not well trained in this regard, or it has (correctly) learned that some images are sensitive to the rotation.

Re: Is It a Duck or a Rabbit? For Google Cloud Vision, Depends on Image Rotation

#19
post #4

That image is a visual illusion. I find it hard myself to detect that it's a rabbit when it's ears are horizontal like a mouth. Not sure what is the purpose of it, is it to show that even computers vision algorithms can get confused by visual illusions?

I find your response more interesting that the experiment.

You don’t just rotate the image in your mind or focus on specific features to bring out the duckiness or rabbit-ness? I can make it more duck or more rabbit as will.

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